Med-mal: the unreformable Northeast?

The charts in this Washington Post article get steadily more interesting as they go along, and the most informative is the last: the top nine states or state-equivalents for per-capita medical malpractice outlays are, in order, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. Basically, that describes the Boston-Washington corridor with the exception of Delaware (Vermont makes for an even more notable break in the pattern because its outlays are among the lowest.) Most states outside the Northeast have reformed their malpractice law; most states in the Northeast have too powerful a trial lawyers’ lobby to let that happen.

Fortunately for residents of the rest of the country, the inconveniences of an unreformed high-litigiousness system — things like $100,000 premiums for doctors with good records who practice high-risk specialties — seem mostly to be borne by residents of the states in question. Overall, incidentally, as the chart previous to that shows, national payouts went through a decade-long decline but now have resumed climbing.

Until recently, Florida would have been a likely pick when enumerating states with the highest medical malpractice exposure, but the Sunshine State legislature finally got tired of being a target of the derision of the national medical profession and reformed its malpractice system. Or perhaps the better phrase would be, “thought it reformed”; the Florida Supreme Court, dominated by justices cozily allied with the plaintiff’s bar in re-election campaigns, just annihilated that reform. No one will be particularly surprised if Florida vaults up to top-ten status in future payout lists.